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Ten months after supposedly wrapping up hearings into a nuclear waste disposal site near Kincardine, a federal review panel is getting set for Round Two.

Starting Tuesday, the panel will spend two weeks examining Ontario Power Generation’s proposal to bury 200,000 cubic metres of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste beside the Bruce nuclear station, on the shore of Lake Huron.

The hearings pick up from a series of public sessions spread over six weeks last fall.

Despite the interval, there’s no sign that supporters and opponents of the plan are any closer to consensus.

In fact, several surprises that pushed the panel into scheduling new hearings have only widened the gulf.

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Among them:

An underground nuclear storage site in New Mexico – cited as an example for the Kincardine operation – leaked radioactive material to the surface last winter;

Former OPG scientist Frank Greening wrote a harsh critique of the company’s published inventory of what is destined for the site, noting that OPG severely understated the level of radioactivity of some material destined for the site.

OPG has filed a mass of further material with the panel – including an assessment by outside experts about whether superior sites might exist elsewhere – but it has done little to quell opposition.

“Given more time and more opportunities to remake or restate their arguments in support of their burial proposal, Ontario Power Generation has succeeded only in demonstrating that the uncertainties persist, their technical case is incomplete, and the application remains so flawed that no approval can be granted,” argues the submission of the North Bay-based environmental group.

That’s not quite the way OPG sums things up.

The company says it has found the ideal rock formation for waste storage – a limestone layer 680 metres underground – in a community that’s willing to accept the facility.

“Frankly, it doesn’t get much better than this,” OPG vice president Jerry Keto glowed in an interview earlier this month, pointing to the limestone’s low permeability, and its stability over the past 450 million years.

As for the willing community, the Bruce site is within the municipal boundary of Kincardine and town council backed the project in 2005.

The panel will have to sort out whether to rely on OPG’s assurances, or the skepticism of the critics.

Although not a formal topic at the hearing, the moral case for the disposal site – or against it – is a constant presence.

When Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. came up with a disposal plan for used nuclear fuel, it couched the argument in part in moral terms (as quoted by a federal commission on nuclear waste that reported in the 1990s.):

“As the present generation benefits significantly from the activities that produce nuclear fuel wastes, it ought to assume disposal responsibilities and minimize any burden placed on future generations as much as possible.”

Its proposed solution was to entomb waste in a deep geologic repository, or DGR, in the ancient and stable granite of the Canadian Shield.

Although OPG’s proposal is to deal with less-potent radioactive waste than used fuel, that moral argument hangs in the background: Is it right for us to pass the problem on to our children? Shouldn’t we who created it, deal with it?

To which the critics respond: That argument only works if you can guarantee, for millennia, that you genuinely contained the waste. Burying the material and walking away from it, they argue, could leave future generations with an even more intractable problem, should today’s technology fail.

Better, they argue, to adopt a system of “rolling stewardship” with the waste plainly visible on the surface, so future generations know exactly what they’re dealing with.

Failing technology will be very much in the foreground of the new hearings, following the release of radiation from the WIPP repository in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which stores waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

A container of waste somehow overheated – possibly due to a chemical reaction of the contents – and released a cloud of radioactive material, a small amount of which leaked to the surface.

The facility remains closed, with questions remaining about what exactly triggered the release, and how the operation will be cleaned up.

OPG insists it won’t happen here. The company says the type of waste it handles is different from WIPP’s, and far more consistent. And it says, among other things, that OPG’s safety culture and practices are superior to those at WIPP.

Critics aren’t comforted.

Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear responsibility says in a submission that leaks at WIPP – and at two European underground waste sites – “underscore the inability of science to predict all the possible outcomes in an underground nuclear waste repository.”

But Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission staff say they’ve gone over OPG’s review of the WIPP accident, and it doesn’t change their assessment of the Kincardine proposal:

“CNSC staff continues to conclude OPG is qualified, and will implement adequate provisions for safety,” they say.

CNSC staff also say that Greening’s critique of the material destined for the site doesn’t alter the fact that it remains safe for workers and the public.

“The nuclear industry has been a part of our community for almost 50 years and will remain an important fixture for many decades to come,” it says in a submission.

“ It is this understanding of nuclear and those who are responsible for its safe management that is the foundation for the acceptance and trust that has been created which in turn is the basis for our continuing support of the Deep Geologic Repository.”

Another bone on contention is OPG’s ultimate plans to double the size of the waste site.

The company says it wants to use the Bruce site to dispose of the rubble of decommissioned nuclear stations, decades from now, when they are shut down and dismantled.

(Pickering, the first to close, is due to shut down about 2020, but it’s likely to be more than 20 years after that before demolition begins.)

While OPG talks openly about those plans, they’re not formally on the table for this week’s hearings.

Other critics hammer away at OPG’s decision not to consider specific alternative sites. It conducted a theoretical analysis of other sites, in other types of rock, but didn’t do field research on any.

“By not requiring an actual investigation of alternative sites, the (panel) has not addressed OPG’s insufficient level of attention to the location issue,” says the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

And hanging over the enterprise remains OPG’s commitment not to proceed with the project without the support of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON), in whose traditional territory the Bruce site lays.

The SON submission to the panel flags the accident in New Mexico as a concern – but doesn’t close the door to the project.

“SON has stated repeatedly that decisions made by others in the past have subjected its communities and territory to risk, and that the decision of OPG to develop the DGR Project stands to subject SON to continued and increasing risk,” its submission states.

“As the incident at WIPP demonstrates, this fear is justified. It is for this reason that the SON communities must be asked if they are willing to accept this risk and their answer must be respected.”

“OPG has recognized this, and has committed to SON that it will not proceed to construction without the support of the SON communities.

“Again, it is critical that this commitment be made part of any approval or licence conditions if the Project should go ahead.”

OPG’s commitment is contained in a letter dated Aug. 7, 2013 from chief executive Tom Mitchell in which he stated:

“OPG will not move forward with the construction of a deep geologic repository for low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste until the SON community is supportive of the project.”

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